a bit of this, a bit of that

Main menu

Tag Archives: Elmer’s

As I mentioned in my cocktail umbrella wreath post, we had a rainbow themed party for my son. One of the decorations that we did for the dining room, was to spice up our light fixture with a star mobile. This is basically the same craft that I did in my Butterfly Mobile tutorial, but I made it a little more pro this time because it wasn’t just a whim.

Here’s what I used:

Craft foam in various colours

scissors

elmer’s glitter glue

crayola glitter glue

vinyl thread

needle

I cut out craft foam stars in 6 different colours and had my kids decorate them using glitter glue. I then used clear vinyl thread to attach them to the light fixture. I used a needle to get the thread through the foam and tied a double knot so the thread wouldn’t pull all the way through. I then tied the other end to the light fixture. This gave the illusion that the stars were just hanging in mid air, which definitely impressed the 5 and under crowd 🙂

My mom bought the kids a foil art kit by Elmer’s because both my kiddos love shiny and sparkly things. The age on the box says 5+, so my kids are a little young for it and they did need quite a bit of help. They still had fun and there seems to be a good bang for buck (my mom paid ~$10). There are 10 posters (2 10″x7″, 4 5″x7″ and 4 3.5″x5″) and 40 small stickers. There are 40 sheets of foil in 10 different colours. Each of my kids did two little posters, so I’ve still got lots left over in my craft closet to pull out on a rainy day.

The way this works is you get a bunch of pre-printed posters and stickers. The posters have individual yellow stickers that you have to peel off. Then you place one of the pieces of coloured foil over the sticky part and rub it. When you lift up the foil piece, the coloured part has stayed on the poster and you are left with just a clear plastic sheet. It’s simple and you get a good result even if you have no artistic talent. Where the little kids need help is to get off all the sticker parts because some of the pieces are really quite small. Also, they tend to rub too roughly and end up crinkling the foil instead of pressing it on to the sticky stuff. All in all we had lots of fun and look forward to doing more.

This craft got five stars from both my kids, and as usual, it’s not quite what I had in mind when I started. However, the end result was more awe inspiring than the original would have been.

This craft really started with a buy one get one for a penny sale on craft foam at Micheal’s. I decided instead of buying a second pack of regular foam I would buy a pack of pre-cut butterflies. Once I got them home I sort of regretted the buy because I thought a few might be fun, but it was going to get boring decorating a whole stack of butterflies. So the butterfly foam pack has been sitting in my craft closet for a few months and I had been mulling over the idea of doing a mobile with some of them to at least deplete the stack . Yesterday when Danny wanted to craft he spotted them and asked to make some butterflies. I sold him on the mobile idea and we started to decorate. We actually had lots of fun and between the three of us we decorated 11 butterflies! I had planned on dismantling his planetary mobile that we made a few months ago and replacing the planets and stars with butterflies, but as I was laying them out to dry on the dining room table, I looked up and realized that our light fixture would make a really great mobile base. My son was more than thrilled to have his work on display in such a high traffic area of our house 🙂 It does add a certain je ne sais quoi to the ambiance in our dinning room (and by je ne sais quoi, I literally mean I don’t know). My husband claims that he know exactly what it adds, and judging by his tone it wasn’t all good… Oh well, he’ll just have to get used to it. I suspect having a mobile in our dining room is going to be a recurring project idea 🙂

Okay, so here’s what we used to make this mobile (so many substitutions are possible, so just use what you have!)

pre-cut craft foam butterflies

peel and stick craft foam flowers

peel and stick sparkly craft foam (I cut it into small rectangles)

Crayola pip squeaks glitter pens

Elmers Shimmer and Shine art glaze

crochet thread

darning needle (a.k.a yarn needle)

And here’s how we made them:

Gather all your supplies and decorate the butterflies. The kids don’t need a lot of help with this one, so I decorated some butterflies as well. I found that my decorating gave the kids ideas for how they could decorate theirs.

Thread your needle with crochet thread and use the needle to pierce the foam butterflies.

NOTE: After I hung them all up I realized that we could have let them dry completely and decorated the other side as well before hanging them. We may do that next time, although the effect is still quite impressive with only one side decorated.